In previous OS News articles, I described how mature computers
up to ten years old can be
refurbished and made useful. One
article identified and evaluated different approaches to
refurbishing. This article tells how to performance tune a mature
Windows computer to make it serviceable again. I hope it will interest
anyone who wants to tune Windows.

For many people a Linux installation would be just fine and they could do everything they needed to do using it, but they simply don't know about it. This is a great pity, but it should be recognised as the pratical fact. Atleast for me Linux just doesn't cut it. I do have Linux installed on my desktop, I got a laptop with Linux, and I have a Linux server, but on my desktop I spend 99% of time in Windows. Why? Well, simply and bluntly put: Linux sucks for gaming.

Fair enough. I personally don't use a computer for gaming ... in my household we have games consoles for that.

Anyways, couldn't we just keep Linux out of the discussion? It'd be nice even for once to have all the damn advocates out and instead focus on the topic at hand: how to tune up a Windows installation. It has nothing to do with Linux or any other OS.

Kind of agree, but not totally. I'm thinking that for older hardware it is no longer possible to "tune" Windows performance back to anything like it was when the machine was new. It may not be possible to get acceptable performance out of it. If people want their machine for some kinds of uses (not gaming), but say email, web browsing, Internet banking, facebook social interaction websites, write the odd letter, perhaps a bit of financial calcualtions or a balance sheet on a spreadsheet, photo management and printing, burn the odd CD, listen to music, YouTube ... all of that is perfectly within the capabilities of Linux on older hardware.

I'm thinking that it is no longer within the capabilities of Windows on older hardware.

" True ... but why for heavens sake? That souldn't happen ... the machine hardware itself is the eaxct same performance over time, that doesn't deteriorate.

I don't know if Vista suffers from performance deterioration, but XP sure does. However, I've now used Windows 7 for half a year and I haven't noticed any kind of performance deterioration _at all_. It's still as spiffy as it was before even though it's in constant, daily use and I haven't even tried to perform any kind of tune-up activities on it. "

Good for you ... but even less relevant to the topic of re-tuning an older Windows machine, and trying to re-instate its performance for some tasks, than what I posted and which you had a shot at me about.